Teaching Civil War History 2.0

The Civil War Sesquicentennial is upon us. Over the next four years Americans will be reminded of and engage in debates about every aspect of a war that fundamentally transformed the nation and that set us on a path we are still working to come to terms with. America went through the same process at the centennial. What’s different this time around is the focus on race and slavery, both of which have the potential to divide Americans and obscure the boundaries between the present and the past; that, and the ability for anyone to access millions of pages of information about the war, its causes and consequences through the Internet.

These two developments are more related than you might guess, a fact I see every day as a history teacher in Virginia. These days, children turn first to their search engines to find information; they conduct a few key-word searches and click on the most popular results without questioning either the search engine’s ranking algorithm or the source of the content. It is nothing less than a crapshoot. The problem is pervasive, but what concerns me is the apparent lack of attention that teachers and administrators have paid to instructing students to properly use search engines and evaluate digital sources. In fact, too few adults know how to, either.

Consider the recent controversy here in Virginia over the content of a fourth-grade history textbook, “Our Virginia: Past and Present” by Joy Masoff. In the chapter on the Civil War, Masoff writes that “thousands of Southerner blacks fought in Confederate ranks, including two battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson.” This brief passage raises one of the most controversial and misunderstood topics in Civil War history. According to a relatively small group of self-styled scholars, anywhere between 1,000 and 100,000 free and enslaved blacks fought willingly in the Confederate army.

The arguments rest on a poor and narrow understanding of the history of the slaveholding South, as well as a faulty analysis of wartime evidence. Professional historians do agree that the Confederate army employed thousands of slaves and free blacks to do various support roles; given their percentage of the population of the South they were essential to the Confederate war effort. Servants of officers often donned uniforms and on occasion may have picked up a rifle to shoot at Union soldiers. Otherwise, beyond a very small handful (who may have passed as white), no black men served in Confederate units until the very end of the war, when the Confederate Congress passed a measure allowing for the limited recruitment of slaves. Indeed, up until then the Confederate government explicitly refused repeated calls to recruit blacks. None of this is controversial within the historical community, and you would be hard-pressed to find a single academic historian who disagreed in any way.

Ms. Masoff, though, is not a professional historian, and has clearly not been trained in historical analysis. In fact, she claims to have gathered her information through an online search. But a claim that has no weight in history departments is all over the place online: take a second to search for “Black Confederates,” and the number of Web sites will overwhelm you. These Web sites have no affiliation with any historical or educational institutions, and they tend to repeat the same narrative; it’s a good bet they are all just paraphrases of one another, rather than the result of independent research. And there is no shortage of wartime illustrations, postwar photographs of Confederate veterans that include black men in uniform. What is almost entirely lacking is any attempt to properly identify and analyze the sources.

All of this is framed by the paranoid assertion that academic historians and others are intentionally ignoring this information and suppressing the truth. Those of you familiar with the historiography of Southern history will, no doubt, be reminded of the “faithful slave” narrative that was so common during the antebellum period and through much of the 20th century, the same line later used by segregationists to claim that civil rights activism could never come from “their” local black populations.

But this claim is something relatively new; in my own research on its evolution I have found very little discussion before the early 1990s. In other words, it seems the Black Confederate narrative is an Internet phenomenon, largely absent from offline material. And yet somehow this information made it past reviewers and into a textbook used by thousands of students across Virginia. Clearly more people than just Ms. Maroff are unfamiliar with historical standards.

The ensuing debate over the textbook played out in the mainstream media and countless newspaper editorials. On occasion a reputable historian’s voice was heard, and Gov. Robert McDonnell has recently promised the state will review its textbook adoption policy. But back in the classroom students and teachers were left to fend for themselves with little guidance. A few districts decided to replace their textbooks, but most opted to simply black out the passage. The thought of teachers and students covering up this particular passage as a quick fix is the perfect metaphor for the real problem that too few people have acknowledged. It is likely that but for the uncovering of this mistake, most instructors would have proceeded to teach their students that thousands of slaves fought alongside white Southerners for a government whose expressed goal was the defense of slavery.

Related

If an adult author can make such an easy mistake, imagine what students are learning about the war online. Of course, that’s not to say that the Internet is purely a bad thing; the key is for teachers to take responsibility to incorporate online research techniques into their syllabuses. Over the past few years I have worked hard to integrate online databases and social media into my classroom, both of which have forced me to rethink what it means to teach history as well as what it means for my students to do history. The creative possibilities are endless, but our work is of little value if we fail to teach our students how to search for reliable content and assess the information they find.

Whether you’re a parent or a teacher, the core of your message should be to remember that a search is only as good as the search strategy. The outcome of any search will be determined by a host of factors, including the choice of browser and keywords. Once you arrive at a specific site, further questions arise. Is the site associated with a reputable institution like a museum, historical society or university? Can you identify the individual or organization responsible for the site, and are the proper credentials displayed? Anything less is the equivalent of chatting with a random individual on the street. Then, finally, you have to examine the material itself. Is the information provided on the Web site, including text and images, properly cited? What can you discern from both the incoming and outgoing links to the site? Only then can you approach it with the same level of trust that you would a scholarly journal or piece of archival material.

The ease with which we can access and contribute to the Web makes it possible for everyone to be his or her own historian, which is both a blessing and a curse. The Internet is both a goldmine of information as well as a minefield of misinformation and distortion. On the eve of the Civil War Sesquicentennial we would do well to keep that in mind as we look to deepen our understanding of this crucial moment in American history.

Sources and Further Reading: The best place to start on the subject of black Confederates is Bruce Levine’s “Confederate Emancipation.” Stephanie McCurry’s “Confederate Reckoning” analyzes the recruitment debate within the broader context of whether the Confederate government in Richmond had the right to impress slaves for various supporting roles in the military. On the dangers of researching this subject Online, see Jerome S. Handler and Michael L. Tuite Jr., “Retouching History.”

Kevin M. Levin is chair of the history department at St. Anne’s–Belfield School in Charlottesville, Va. and is the author of the blog Civil War Memory.

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